The Internationalization of Canadian Faculties of Law: Contributions to a Modern Legal Knowledge Economy

Abstract

How do law faculties in Canada deal with internationalization in terms of their political economy and knowledge, and how do international students contribute to the circulation and production of legal knowledge? This dissertation draws on the evolution of international student enrollment from 2010 to 2020 and interviews with law professors from the six most internationalized faculties of law in Canada to describe the main features of the internationalization of legal education in the country to answer those questions. The extended case method is applied to amplify the discussions. The populational distribution of international students in faculties of law, compared to universities, points out structuring factors of current models and shows how different the internationalization in law is from the patterns in universities in general. Social situations presented by participants, touching on how they conceptualize internationalization, institutional strategies, relations with international students, circuits of circulation of knowledge, and economic aspects, reveal how the forces of academicism, professionalism, and globalization interact to frame the current internationalization of Canadian law faculties. Based on that, I propose a theoretical reconstruction of the Law and Learning tradition where the analysis of the political economy of legal education focuses on the traits of the ongoing legal knowledge economy. It concludes by claiming that forces of professionalism have led the internationalization of law faculties according to a business model similar to the pre-modern mercantilist economic system, in line with the reproduction of law as a pre-modern discipline. In that system, international students are primarily consumers rather than producers of knowledge within a legal knowledge economy that lacks communication between basic research and the profession. An alternative modern legal knowledge economy is imagined, where a modern legal science is unleashed from formal institutions of practice and international students become valuable assets for innovation both in legal research and practice.